by Jim Crumley
But I walk in today’s wood and it is lit by that sun from the outside world and pungent with early spring. Walk softly, read nature, possess sensations. I scrutinise every small bird sound for the four-syllable signature of the crested tit. I stop dead at the first sound of it and I wait. There is a chance that sooner or later it will come close and a crested tit at close quarters is a pocket-sized piece of northness. This is their world. All they ask is a good tract of pine trees. They belong utterly in a wood like this. In Rothiemurchus (and in the other pinewoods of the Cairn-gorms: Abernethy, Glen More, Glen Feshie, Glen Derry, Glen Quoich, Glen Lui, Ballochbuie, Glen Tanar) they live in splendid isolation, nesting in dead pine trees, disputing territorial rights with tree creepers, disputes sometimes conducted in pairs. Such a dispute is a breathless dance of flat-out manoeuvres, blurring wings, tight turns, and loud irritation. I have never seen them actually come to blows but I have no doubt that it happens, in which case I would imagine that the odds are on the tree creepers, what with their outsize claws and sabre beak. Not all of nature’s great conflicts over the 10,000 years of the Great Wood’s story were fought out between wolves and aurochs.
The Great Wood of Caledon had many different densities of trees, from something like chaotic plantations – spaces crammed with young trees that had to compete with each other for the right to grow tall – to something like parkland. Rothiemurchus echoes that tendency, and suddenly something like parkland slows my pace again. Here is a new kind of space to contemplate, space punctuated by rounded giants of pines and stands of waving birch – a pale shade at last – then the first glimpse of mountains beyond – folds of huge, blunt, dark red shapes where the trees fail against their lowest slopes.
As soon as I leave the warm acres of the clearing, Rothiemurchus cools and closes in again, but from that moment on, I will walk in possession of that ultimate sensation in this landscape – the shape and the shade of the mountains’ presence, sensed even when they are hidden from sight by the shape and the shade of the pines. Back on the track, Rothiemurchus settles once again into the familiar rhythm nature insists on, my own soft footfall and the elephant-slow progress of the wood as it slips quietly past, tree by tree by tree by tree. Then something new begins. The landscape begins to realign itself as the path begins to lean towards the river whose voice has begun to announce its approach well before it comes into view. And I begin to discern something particular and familiar in the lie of the land. And I know that soon a solitary pine tree will emerge from the horde, will detach itself from the press of thousands of others and stand there on a low ridge and the mountain shape of Carn Elrig will lift into the sky behind it. Something fundamental, something old and primitive slips into place and I begin to anticipate a particular set of landscape circumstances involving tree and mountain; I am navigating by the trees the way seamen used to navigate by the stars. And while it is true that no one needs to ‘navigate’ from Coylumbridge to Loch Einich today (the ‘path’ has been made to accommodate Land Rovers), there was a time when the earliest settlers here followed the paths laid down by the travellers of the Great Wood – red deer, roe deer, reindeer, fox, badger, lynx, bear, wolf – and they knew where they were when they could align two different features of the landscape into a particular configuration. So I walk, looking at the tree and the mountain, until I have aligned the tree perfectly beneath the summit of the mountain and made of that painterly composition a symbolic harmony of pine and granite and of the space between them that also binds them. I have made one of the oldest things that my species ever created as it began to explore the Great Wood – a landmark, a reference point. From here I know how long it will take me to reach the loch, how long to retrace my steps to Coylumbridge, how long to climb the mountain, how long to head out into the trackless west following the swirl of the upper limit of the trees until I reach the upper limit of the upper limit, the one true stretch of natural treeline in all Rothiemurchus, all the Highlands, all the Great Wood of Caledon. It is a kind of woodland shrine. Its name is spoken by foresters and silviculturalists everywhere with the reverence of the pilgrim: Creag Fiaclach.
CHAPTER NINE
Creag Fiaclach
Creag Fiaclach is an outcrop of Creag Dhubh, which is an outcrop of Sgoran Dubh Mor, which is the massively defining western flank of Gleann Einich, which, with a little help from Sgor Gaoith, Carn Ban Mor and the lower reaches of Braigh Riabhach, makes a box canyon of the glen and makes the shores of Loch Einich one of the most thrilling places in the land by day, and, by virtue of Sgoran Dubh Mor’s miles of bulging cliffs, one of the uneasiest places I know to spend a night in a tent. On the other hand, to stand on the summit of Sgoran Dubh Mor just beyond the cliff tops is to feel as if you are under siege from the marshalled forces of sheer space that characterise the high Cairngorms. At the north end of Loch Einich you have left the trees four miles behind you. On the summit of Sgoran Dubh Mor they are about the same distance, which is much nearer than you might think and much higher too, for Creag Fiaclach is the setting for the uppermost gesture of the Great Wood of Caledon before it acknowledges its ultimate limitation and submits to the unstoppable power of mountain winds. Here is the only naturally occurring stretch of treeline anywhere in the land, and it concedes defeat at about 2,200 feet.
Imagine all the mountains of the Highlands that reach, say, at least 2,500 feet – all the Corbetts and all the Munros – and all the thousands of miles there must be that represent the 2,200-feet contour. Imagine too, for the sake of un-scientific argument, that half of these mountains once sustained significant native woodlands. Even if only half of that half was able to sustain trees at their natural upper limit, that’s still at least a thousand miles of natural treeline. Yet the trees on Creag Fiaclach are all that are left of that treeline, about three to four hundred yards of it. If you would like some measure of the demise of Highland Scotland’s native woodland, or even a metaphor for it, you need look no further.
You can reach Creag Fiaclach from the Gleann Einich track, gaining height gradually as you cut obliquely up through the contours by keeping just above today’s treeline. Or you can wander the broad ridge north and downhill from Sgoran Dubh Mor to Creag Dhubh then bear north-west and still downhill until your gaze snags wide-eyed on the first trees, trees such as you have never dreamed of, but trees nevertheless. But better than either of these is to climb from the little showpiece of Rothiemurchus where the trees are the trees of dream. If the ambition of your expedition is to witness the last helpless shrug of the Great Wood as nature and only nature has shaped it and commanded it to evolve; if that is the be all and end all of your day’s endeavour as it has so often been mine, then head for lovely Loch an Eilein, lovely but more or less sacrificed by the estate’s mostly commendable efforts to reconcile the encouragement of tourism with landscape and wildlife conservation.
Start at Loch an Eilein because of the trees, because historically, even at the lowest ebb of Rothiemurchus’s fortunes, the Grant family has accorded it affection and protection for purely aesthetic reasons. In the early years of the nineteenth century, for example, when timber extraction here was currency and the estate exploited it almost to the point of environmental catastrophe, Loch an Eilein was still not negotiable. Chris Smout writes in Rothiemurchus – Nature and People on a Highland Estate, 1500–2000: ‘One small section round Loch an Eilein, Loch Gamhna and the Lochans was reserved and remained legally protected from sale because the family considered it an essential part of the “pleasure grounds of the manour of the Doune”.’ The ‘manour of the Doune’ is the historic home of the Grants of Rothiemurchus, and it was rescued and restored from the threefold ignominy of a hotel, a hunting lodge and a ruin by the present owner, John Grant.
Loch an Eilein’s car park, visitor centre and walk-this-way footpath sometimes jar with the gorgeous setting, the ‘honeypot’ school of visitor management that I never much cared for, but the beauty of the place is undeniable and that beauty derives primarily from
trees. So it is good to start here, where the pinewood is a douce and benevolent blanket, considering the nature of the day’s destination.
Beyond the loch to the south is Coire Buidhe, a thing not so much of beauty as rarity in the context of a Highland landscape, being a corrie thronged with native trees. I simply love to climb up through the corrie, up through the trees, watching the slow transition unfold as the lush, springy and knee-deep understorey begins to grow sparse and shrinks to ankle-deep then vanishes among boulders, rocks, pebbles, gravel. The woodland unfolds a complementary transition as the dense, robust trees of the lower slopes begin to grow sparse and shrink in both height and girth. Then the corrie wall eases into the open mountain-side, the wind hurtles down from the plateau, and with a quite startling suddenness (it startles every time) there is that weird Gulliver moment in which I find myself much taller than the trees.
That wind is quite capable of 100 miles per hour hereabouts, and up on the highest, widest reaches of the plateau in winter, 150 is quite feasible. I have just stepped out of the workaday world of a Highland pinewood into a land of quite uncompromising extremes, and it was all just the work of a few minutes, a few uphill yards. I gasp for breath, I look around at where I stand, and there are the crowns of the trees down there. For the trees’ response to such a wind is to bow down to it, to flatten and grow sideways instead of upwards. I have never seen such trees other than in these few yards of Creag Fiaclach’s frontier. Here, a juniper bush is as tall as a pine tree, ‘tall’ being a less than appropriate adjective for what is going on, for most are no more than waist-high and some no more than knee-high. Some are airy as thistledown, some as densely matted as a tabletop. All of them crouch and make what they can of the land’s suddenly miserable store of nutrients by expanding outwards in every direction. I came this way once in low cloud with visibility down to about 50 yards. It was like wandering into a parallel and alien world populated by giant, sightless crabs. It is perhaps the most primitive place I have ever seen. The forces at work – the might of the wind and the puny tenacity of the trees – are things that pass my understanding.
Creag Fiaclach. Remember the name, for it is emblematic of a lost land, a broken frontier of the Great Wood. No, not a broken frontier, an overwhelmed one. The Romans may have turned back at the prospect of the Great Wood. Here is where the Great Wood turned back.
CHAPTER TEN
Glen Strathfarrar
The hills around Loch Monar were steep, orange and bare, and bedevilled by a mid-autumn wind with a mid-winter lash to its tongue. The orange of the thin, unnourishing grasses would fade to pale tawny inside a month. A dam hems in the loch and gives it that too-full look, commanding the River Farrar to leap rather than to seep into life.
I sat huddled over a sandwich, an apple and a flask of tea that cooled too quickly. I considered the long glen I had just travelled to arrive at this gaudy amphitheatre with its sullen, steel-grey watersheet fretting whitely at the dam wall. The hillside where I sat was sodden; its every gully and deer track gushed and muttered and oozed with water on the move. The glen that ended far to the east in the middle country of the Beauly River sprang from this blasted heath not 20 miles from the Atlantic seaboard.
Something fundamental was at work here; I had reached an extremity of the empire of trees, a northern rampart of the Great Wood of Caledon. Wherever I have travelled among these remaining strongholds of the Great Wood, I have wondered if I might find such a final gesture sooner or later, and if I did, where I would find it and how I would recognise it. Would there be a last climactic landscape gesture with a spectacularly treeless northern panorama beyond, perhaps a sign saying ‘here be dragons’? But instead, arguably the most beautiful treed glen of them all simply climbed and narrowed up and out of the realm of trees and lost itself in a huddle of bare, steep, orange hills, and there was a fitful drizzle adrift on a damnable north wind, a blink of sun that conspired wearily with the drizzle to make a pale rainbow, and there was a golden eagle that dallied in the high, cold air for 20 minutes, indifferent to all of it.
I don’t believe hills like these were ever wooded. The ice that shaped them, whittling them like a dirk on a hazel wand, left no sustenance for trees. Bare rock bursts through the taut, orange skin of the autumn landscape. In hills where the Great Wood once flourished and was driven out, trees still cling to the steep gullies shunned by those tribes that grazed and felled and burned to excess; rowans and birches still spring from clefts in boulders and offer up green sprigs to nesting eagles. But not here. Not on this gaunt watershed beyond which the Highlands face west and contemplate the short, sharp descent to the ocean. These golden-eagle-tilted hills that crowd around Loch Monar felt the ice come and go, and they were as bare after it as they were before it, as they are now. The transformation after the long woodland miles of the glen below is fast and startling. Glen Strathfarrar, when you travel it from east to west, is a slowly evolving and increasingly intoxicating distillation of native trees in almost all their Highland moods (although without the breadth or scale of the Great Plain of the Firs). When such a phenomenon is heightened by all the shades of prime autumn, the headiness of it all is almost beyond words, which is a dangerous terrain for a nature writer.
Its douce beginning a few miles from the town of Beauly involves a short drive along a shyly signposted single-track road through a kind of coarse parkland, the comparatively wide and comparatively flat strath-like overture, complete with domesticated red deer. You suspect that the land and the deer will be wilder before the day is over. There is a locked gate by a cottage where, outwith the winter months, your car is issued with a (free) permit and you are asked (courteously) to be back by 6 p.m. If you choose to walk or cycle there are no restrictions – good luck, bon voyage and have a nice day. I swallowed my unease in the face of an estate road with a locked gate and a time limit; the good-humoured, hail-fellow-well-met welcome from the woman in the cottage and her eagerness to chat about the wildlife were mercifully mitigating factors. Also, the glen is a National Nature Reserve and I have never been one to quibble about restricting car access into the heart of one of these. But still . . . a locked road? In the twenty-first century?
Glen Strathfarrar begins to change character almost at once and plunges into a narrowing two-tone world of flame-shaded birches and glowing bottle-green Scots pines. There will be countless variations on the theme of native trees in a Highland setting before the glen is done with you, but that twofold conspiracy of colours and tree shapes establishes at first glance both the character of the glen and your most durable memories of the time you spend in its company.
The River Farrar lays a dark and steely silver-grey thread through the weave of that tapestry-in-landscape, a thread enlivened by the too-whiteness of rapids. Trees crowd down to the banks where leafless alders greyly soften the pine-and-birch regime. But turn your back on the river and suddenly the slowly brightening mid-morning hillside birches swarm and smoulder, and spotlights of pale sun fan them into blazing thickets. The sorcery of trees has begun again.
The glen opens suddenly. The trees stand back and you see for the first time that they clothe the hillsides in climbing tiers, growing sparser as they climb. Low cloud is beginning to rise and fade, the sun beginning to cheer the land, and – also for the first time – you see distance, and in that distance too there are trees. The river has vanished. A small loch blinks in the growing brightness. I think of Thoreau at Walden: ‘A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.’
Our eyes meet – mine and the earth’s. Mine are a northern blue, but this earth’s eye is a kaleidoscope. The water by its farthest and nearest shores is milky white, but because the hour is windless and the surface utterly still, it reflects every shade of tree and hillside, but tones them down in one strenuous effort to contain them all. The darkest pines inverted in its darkest depths look almost black, and the
most brazen birches are embers rather than flames. A glimpse of the hillside beyond the western shore is treeless and orange, and that too lays a broad band of a lesser shade clear across the earth’s eye from north to south.
The southern shore is dominated by a particularly dense stretch of woodland, a persuasive emblem of a Great Wood, should you need such a thing. It creates the illusion of rising right in the middle of the loch to a regal crown of big pines. Some oak trees – the first I’d seen in the glen – are conspicuous in the throng, and again a grey fleece of alders wades into the water’s edge, and again clusters of birch explode with yellow light among the dark pines. The earth’s eye takes all that in and inverts it and makes of it one of the day’s indelible memories, in fact one of the most indelible memories of my exploration of the entire realm of the Great Wood of Caledon. The lightest of showers drifts by and veils the trees, hissing softly on the water. It trails the hint of a rainbow and vanishes as if it has never been.
The northern shore of the loch is craggy, heathery, brackeny, and more sparsely treed. There are far fewer pines; more birches, scraps of holly and juniper, a handful of waterline alders, and here and there the showstoppers of autumn in such a glen – aspens. These flaunt a shade of gold that is quite beyond anything even the birches might dare. Beneath the crags the hillside is the dull red of faded heather and the rust of turning bracken, but between the trees and the water the hill grasses are the most vivid shade of orange. The loch accommodates all of these and repeats the hillside gullies in sweeping diagonal parallels. An hour in this kind of company drifts by in the blink of an eye while you measure the depth of your own nature. This particular earth eye is called Loch Beannacharan, which, unless my frail grasp of Gaelic misses by miles, means the Loch of Blessings. Amen to that.